Like many of you I spent Sunday night watching the Super Bowl – well, watching the Super Bowl commercials because the game got sad really quickly.

One ad that really caught my eye was the Coca-Cola “It’s Beautiful” commercial.

For those of you who didn’t see it, the commercial showed a diverse group of Americans performing classic scenes in our culture.

It included cowboys, going to the movies, road trips, surfing, dancing, skating, camping, family dinners and even a pool party.

But what was special about it was that, while all of this was going on, “America the Beautiful” was sung in English as well as other languages including Spanish, Hindi, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, Keres, Arabic and Tagalong.

But in a Twitter and YouTube firestorm the commercial was viewed by some as extremely controversial.

I have never seen so many racial slurs, bigotry, hatred, ignorance and grammatical errors in my life all under the banner of “this is America, we speak English here.”

That being said, we do not all speak English here.

There are over 337 languages being spoken right now in the United States.

This might be news to a lot of you but English is not our official language. We actually don’t have one. It is our de-facto national language because it is the most commonly used.

Outside of the little bubble that some of us live in this country is alive with the beautiful sounds of languages and dialects from all over the world.

I think some people are forgetting the second verse of America the beautiful, which says “O beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness.”

Unless you are of full Native American ancestry you are the descendant of immigrants. When we came here we brought our cultures and languages with us and mixed with those that were already here to create a beautiful melting pot.

For people to say that since English is spoken by the majority of the population it should be the only language used by Americans is like saying that since the largest religion in the United States is Christianity that no other one should be practiced.

One of the great things about America is that you are not forced to forget where you come from. It’s like we have little pieces of the whole world in just one country.

That’s what makes America beautiful. We are a place full of diversity, and differences continue to strengthen us as a nation.

The beauty of the United States comes in the fact that, though we are all so different, we can come together as one nation.